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Cache is a hardware component containing a relatively small and extremely fast memory designed to speed up the performance of a CPU by preparing ahead of time the data it needs to read from a relatively slower medium such as main memory.

The organization and amount of cache can have a large impact on the performance, power consumption, die size, and consequently cost of the IC.

Cache is specified by its size, number of sets, associativity, block size, sub-block size, and fetch and write-back policies.